Finally! My Yahoo is Getting an Upgrade

I have been a long time My Yahoo! user and over time have accumulated quite a collection of personalized content. But lately, with new and innovative services like Netvibes and PageFlakes, I had grown overly frustrated with the lack of investment in My Yahoo! and had been considering migrating away from using it. Finally, it looks like Yahoo! has decided to change course and some exciting new features are coming our way. The new My Yahoo! is currently offered in Beta to a limited number of users. For a preview of what's coming, check out this screencast. Also, Yahoo! is starting a new My Yahoo! blog that will hopefully give users a good sense of where things are going.

So, I guess I will wait a little longer and see if the new My Yahoo! finally gets to par with its competition.

Jetspeed 2.1 Released!

Congratulations to the Jetspeed team who released Jetspeed 2.1 this week-end. Included in this release are a large number of bug fixes and some significant new features including:

• Jetspeed Desktop: a web 2.0 client-side JSR-168 portlet aggregation
• Parallel Rendering: multithreaded portlet aggregator with portlet timeout tracking and removal of slow rendering portlets
• Jetspeed Distributed Cluster: support for distributed deployments of the portal on multiple application server platforms
• JSR 168 Caching: full caching support of the JSR-168 portlet specification and distributed cache invalidation
• Improved LDAP support: full security maintenance using LDAP is now supported for many LDAP providers
• Full fledge AJAX API

All great features that will go a long way to make Jetspeed 2.1 an option for enterprise portal deployments.

The Jetspeed 2.1 release comes with a nice installer and you can try it for yourself in about 5-10 minutes.



The detailed releases notes are available on Jetspeed-2 web site.

Below is a screenshot of the new Jetspeed-2 desktop client side aggregation.

Interesting Open Source WSRP Consumers/Producers Compatibility Analysis

A colleague of mine recently pointed out an interesting presentation from CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory (University of Portsmouth) comparing experiences with open source portals WSRP development and testing.

By standardizing presentation-oriented web services, WSRP makes it possible to construct web portals in "plug-and-play" mode. This presentation compares WSRP support for the eXo Platform, Liferay, StringBeans and uPortal. WSRP4J, which is not a portal framework but a reference implementation of the WSRP 1.0 specification and the basis of WSRP support in many portal frameworks, is also discussed. In summary, WSRP Open Source implementations are still in early stages. From a producer standpoint, WSRP4J is clearly the most compatible of all and can be accessed by all the reviewed WSRP consumers. From a consumer standpoint, none of the consumers are fully functional. From Xiaobo Yang, Xiao Dong Wang and Rob Allan presentation, the test summary is shown below.

Jetspeed-2 Desktop: Client Side Portlet Aggregation

I have not had much time to get involved with Jetspeed lately, but when I read Steve Milek post on the development list last Monday, I figured I had to check out the new Jetspeed-2 desktop mode. And I have to say, this is shaping out quite nicely.

Essentially, the Jetspeed j2o Desktop mode combines Jetspeed server-side portal services with client side ajax services. Traditionally, Jetspeed has been a server centric application where every request is processed by the server request pipeline. In Jetspeed j2o desktop the page aggregation is controlled by the client services. This makes for a pretty sleek client experience. The Jetspeed j2o implementation significantly leverages the DOJO library and essentially implements a client side JSR 168 compliant portlet rendering engine. Some screenshots are enclosed below.

Jetspeed-2 Desktop View


Jetspeed-2 Desktop Portlet Drag and Drop


Jetspeed-2 Back in Normal Portal View

Users can switch back to the traditional Jetspeed view:


For more details, read Steve's post on the Jetspeed-2 dev list. Great job from the jetspeed team!

Jetspeed-2.0 has been released!

Two years in the making and a busy couple last months and there it is. Jetspeed 2.0 final release is out! From the release announcement:

The Apache Portals Jetspeed Team is pleased to announce the final release of the Jetspeed 2.0 Open Source Enterprise Portal. This final release is fully-compliant with the Portlet Specification 1.0 (JSR-168). Jetspeed-2 has passed the TCK (Test Compatibility Kit) suite and is fully CERTIFIED to the Java Portlet Standard.
The Jetspeed team will be presenting the new 2.0 release at ApacheCon US 2005 on December 10th in San Diego.
Jetspeed is a full implementation of the Java Portlet API. Notable features include security components backed by LDAP and database implementations and some robust administration interfaces. Custom portals can be built and deployed using the Jetspeed plugin for Maven. Developers can use the Jetspeed PSML language to assemble portlets and the Apache Portals Bridges project to 'bridge' portals with existing technologies including Struts, JSF, PHP, Perl. For GUI designers, Jetspeed comes with several built-in templates used to decorate portals and portlets. Join the growing community of Jetspeed users and developers at ApacheCon. David Sean Taylor will be presenting a Jetspeed tutorial that shouldn't be missed by anyone interested in the technology.

Features of the Final Release Include:

Standardized:

• Fully compliant with Java Portlet API Standard 1.0 (JSR 168)
• Passed JSR-168 TCK Compatibility Test Suite
• J2EE Security based on JAAS Standard, JAAS DB Portal Security Policy
• LDAP Support for User Authentication

Foundation Component Architecture:

• Spring-based Components and Scalable Architecture
• Configurable Pipeline Request Processor
• Auto Deployment of Portlet Applications
• Jetspeed Component Java API
• Jetspeed AJAX XML API
• PSML: Extended Portlet Site Markup Language
  
  • Database Persistent
  • Content Management Facilities
  • Security Constraints

Portal Core Features:

• Declarative Security Constraints and JAAS Database Security Policy
• Runtime Portlet API Standard Role-based Security
• Portal Content Management and Navigations: Pages, Menus, Folders, Links
• Multithreaded Aggregation Engine
• PSML Folder CMS Navigations, Menus, Links
• Jetspeed SSO (Single Sign-on)
• Rules-based Profiler for page and resource location
• Integrates with most popular databases including: Derby, MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, Postgres, DB2
• Client independent capability engine (HTML, XHTML, WML, VML)
• Internationalization: Localized Portal Resources in 12 Languages
• Statistics Logging Engine
• Portlet Registry
• Full Text Search of Portlet Resources with Lucene
• User Registration
• Forgotten Password
• Rich Login and Password Configuration Management

Administrative Portlets:

• User, Role, Group, Password, and Profile Management
• JSR 168 Generic User Attributes Editor:
  • JSR 168 Preferences Editor
  • Site Manager
  • SSO Manager
  • Portlet Application and Lifecycle Management
  • Profiler Administration
  • Statistics Reports

Web Framework Support and Sample Portlets:

• Bridges to other Web Frameworks: JSF, Struts, PHP, Perl, Velocity
• Sample Portlets:
  • RSS, IFrame, Calendar XSLT, Bookmark, Database Browser
  • Integration with Display Tags, Spring MVC

Customization Features:

• Administrative Site Manager
• Page Customizer

Portal Design Features:

• Deployment Jetspeed Portlet and Page Skins (Decorators) CSS Components
• Configurable CSS Page Layouts
• Easy to Use Velocity Macro Language for Skin and Layout Components

Development Tools

• Automated Maven Build
• Jetspeed-2 Maven Plugin for Custom Portal Development
• AutoDeployment of Portlet Applications, Portal Resources
• Deployment Tools
• Plugin Goals integrated with Auto Deployment Feature

Application Servers Supported:

• Tomcat 5.0.x
• Tomcat 5.5.x
• Websphere 5.1, 6.0
• JBoss

The release is available for download from the Apache Download Mirrors:
http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-2/download.html
We hope you enjoy using Jetspeed! Documentation is available at: http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-2/.

Jetspeed Security - JAAS all the way...

I finally got some time to update Jetspeed security documentation. I still have a little bit of work to do, but I think this is a good beginning and it was badly lacking. Jetspeed 2 fully leverages JAAS for authentication (through the implementation of javax.security.auth.spi.LoginModule) and authorization (through the implementation of a custom java.security.Policy) and provides a flexible security framework with a set of coarse grained services for user management, role management, group management and permission management.


Jetspeed security SPI provides a pluggable authentication and authorization architecture. I found interesting some of the similarities with Acegi as pointed out by Keith Gary Boyce on Jetspeed user list.
For future releases, I am planning to investigate integration with JACC and with JSR 196. Additionally, Jetspeed provides some nice portlets that provide management features for the security framework.